lierne - A short rib
that runs from one main rib of a vault
to another.

(pr. lee-ERN)

life drawing - The act of drawing
the human figure from
a live (often nude)
model, and each such
drawing produced. Widely considered an essential component of
an artist's education, life drawing trains the simultaneous workings
of the eyes, the brain, and the hand; and increases skills needed
for representation of the
human form — arguably the most important
subject in art
in its long history. Life drawing
should increase knowledge of
the underlying structure of
the human figure — from skeletal to muscle, fat, and skin — the form to which any costume
must correspond. Life drawing establishes the importance of seeing
the figure dynamically — in its cababilities for variety
of pose and composition,
action and expression.
There are many ways to intensify the learning experience of life
drawing. One is the practice of gesture
drawing — drawing at relatively great speeds, for as long
as five minutes, and as short as a few seconds. Others are continuous-line and contour drawing.

life mask - A cast of
the face of a living person. Usually such casts have been made
from a mold produced by placing
gesso or plaster
on the face, with a passage provided for breathing through the
mold. Such a mold is likely to be of one piece, since the face
is generally sufficiently flexible to enable removal of the hardened
mold, as long as a release agent
has been applied. A death mask
is very similar.

Mark Tansey (American, 1949-), The Innocent Eye Test, 1981, oil
on canvas, Metropolitan Museum
of Art, NY. Mark Tansey is known particularly for his monochromatic
paintings which are often humorous mock-historical scenes that refer to art historicalsubjects
and concern art criticism.
This picture depicts a group of official looking men observing
and recording a
cow's reaction to a life-size painting of two cows. The men are
dressed in lab coats and corporate suits, and with the exception
of one man holding a mop, they are all wearing eyeglasses. The
cow is looking
at an actual painting: Paulus
Potter (Dutch, 1625-1654), The Young Bull, 1647. See pastoral.

Jim Hellemn (American, contemporary), Bloody Bay
Wall, 2001, photograph, 20 x 62 feet. Bloody Bay Wall
is part of a unique ocean reef system surrounding Little Cayman
Island, a popular destination for scuba divers in the British
West Indies. You can see this photograph online at life-size
— an image of the underwater site as if you were exploring it
in real life. The scene is fully illuminated in a way that shows
the true colors of the marine life. To view the Blood Bay
Wall mural at life-size, click on the link above. Then click
on the "Zoom In" icon. The mural image will appear
in a new window. To zoom in, select the magnifying glass tool,
then click, hold and drag with the left mouse button. Drag toward
the lower part of the screen to zoom in. For more info hit the
"See it Life-size" link. The image on the web is an
24 bit RGB image 16,992 pixels high x 53,568 pixels wide. This
is life-size at typical screen resolution of 72 dpi. The full
high resolution version of the Bloody Bay Wall image is 23,010
pixels high x 72,540 pixels wide. Unfortunately, the free plug-in
with which to view the mural runs only on a Windows PC.

Celebritycutouts.com currently makes life-size
cardboard cutouts of photos
of celebrities of popular culture
— entertainers, politicians, etc. "Great for parties and
special events whether it's for school, business or personal
enjoyment."

ligature - In calligraphy
and typography, two or more
letters joined together to create a single character.
Among the most common such combinations: æ (a+e) and Æ
(A+E). Among other letters most commonly combined include oe,
fi, ff, and ffl. When cast type was employed (before the digital
revolution), a ligature was cast
on the same body of type. Kerning,
by comparison with ligature,
is the technique of adjusting
the spacing between two letters
to bring them close enough to overlap.
Some ligatures, including "æ", might be described
as made by kerning. The horizontal
spaces between lines of type
are called leading.

lightfast - Having the ability to resist fading on long exposure
to sunlight. Denotes permanence
when applied to pigment. The
opposite quality is called
fugitive.

lightness - The dimension of a color
which is correlated with luminance and by which visual stimuli
are ordered continuously from very dim to very bright.
Pure white has the maximum brightness, and pure black the minimum
brightness.

"Every artist knows that there is
no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing
an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers
and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain
key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other.
He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the
more intense his feelings, the farther he goes from general truth
and general emotion."
Willa Cather (1873-1947), American author, Lights on Adobe
Walls, an incomplete manuscript, in Willa Cather on Writing,
1949.

"Art consists of limitation . . .
. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British author, Tremendous Trifles,
"The Troy Theatre," 1909. See frame.

"In art progress consists not in
extension but in the knowledge of its limits."
Georges Braque (1882-1963), French Cubist painter, Nord-Sud
Revue, December 12, 1917. See knowledge.

"It's good to have limits."
Duke Ellington (1899-1974), American composer, pianist, and bandleader,
Music Is My Mistress, 1973.

"Creativity arises out of the tension
between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river
banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are
essential to the work of art or poem."
Rollo May, psychologist, The Courage to Create, 1975.

"Understatement is always the absolute
best way to put forth earthshaking ideas."
Anonymous. A humorous rule of grammar.

"The Schuyler Limner" (American,
active in NY, in the Albany-Schenectady area 1717-1725), Mr.
Willson, 1720, oil.
The "Schuyler Limner" could possibly be Nehemiah Partridge.

"The Beardsley Limner" (American,
active 1785-1805), Mrs. Hezekiah Beardsley, c. 1785-1790,
oil, Yale University Art Gallery,
NJ. The Beardsley Limner was an itinerant artist who executed
several naive portraits along the old Boston Post Road, in Connecticut
and Massachusetts, from about 1785 to 1805. This name is derived
from portraits this artist made of Elizabeth and Hezekiah Beardsley.
The Beardsley Limner may actually be a Connecticut pastelist
Sarah Perkins. Some stylistic similarities exist between the
two, but there are sufficient differences to raise questions
about this identification.

Richard Long (English, 1945-), A Line Made by Walking, 1967, photograph
and pencil on board, image:
37.5 x 32.4 cm, Tate Gallery, London. Long created this earth
work by walking back and forth along the same line
in a grassy field in Somerset, England, wearing away a thin path,
which lasted until the grass grew back again. Long took this
photo of his work in order to document
it.

Quotes:

"It is to be observed that straight
lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental.
That curv'd lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature
as well as in their length, begin on that account to be ornamental.
That straight and curv'd lines joined, being a compound line,
vary more than curves alone, and so become somewhat more ornamental.
That the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more,
being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental
and pleasing . . . and that the serpentine line, or line of grace,
by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads
the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety."
William Hogarth (1697-1764), English painter. The Analysis
of Beauty.

"Art, like morality, consists in
drawing a line somewhere."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English author.

"As in the fourteen lines of a sonnet,
a few strokes of the pencil can hold immensity."
Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), English. The Magic of a Line.

linear perspective - A
system of drawing or painting
in which the artist
attempts to create the illusion
of spatial depth on a two-dimensionalsurface. It works by following
consistent geometric rules for rendering objects as they appear
to the human eye. For instance, we see parallel lines as converging
in the distance, although in reality they do not. Stated another
way, the lines of buildings and other
objects in a picture are slanted
inward making them appear to extend back into space.
If lengthened these lines will meet at a point along an imaginary
horizontal line representing
the eye level. Each such imaginary line is called an orthogonal.
The point at which such lines meet is called a vanishing
point.

The invention of linear perspective
dates to the early 1400s, with Filippo Brunelleschi's experiments
in perspective painting and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on
perspective theory.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972),
Belvedere, 1958, lithograph,
8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches (462 x 295 mm), National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC. This belvedere
has three stories, but its drawing
results in an optical illusion.
Escher has employed a hybrid of linear
perspective that produces a mixture of two possibilities.
Note how the pillars connect
the second to the third story.

linen - A cloth woven
from thread made from fibers of the flax plant. Although it has
been used in many ways, linen has been an especially desireable
support for painting.
As such it is one of several textiles
that may be called canvas.

linoleum cut, linocut, or lino-cut -
A linoleum block or plate
used for making reliefprints. Linoleum is a durable,
washable material formerly
used more for flooring as vinyl flooring is used today. It is
usually backed with burlap or canvas,
and may be purchased adhered
to a wooden block. The linoleum can be cut in much the same way
woodcuts are produced, however
its surface is softer and without grain. Also refers to a print
made with this method. Linoleum cuts have been made by Henri Matisse
(French, 1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973).

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972),
Reflection, 1950, linoleum cut printed
from two blocks, 26 x 32 cm. Two raindrops have fallen into a
pond, and, with the concentric, expanding ripples that they cause,
disturb the still reflection
of a tree with the moon behind it. See optical
illusion and World
of Escher.

Peter Gourfain (American, 1934-), Hen Eys Tru Ile, 1993, linoleum cut on handmade paper. Peter Gourfain is fascinated by language and has developed his own alphabet (used here in his signature), and many of his works incorporate palindromes -- words or phrases that read the same backward as forward. The title of this work is culled from the apparently random vertical sorting of one column of text, which, when read in normal sequence offer the aphorism,“When money speaks truth is silent.” The four corner heads are inhabited by another sort of text: signing hands that spell out F-E-A-R.

"I have often thought that this simple
medium is comparable to the violin with its bow: a surface, a
gouge - four taut strings and a swatch of hair. The gouge, like
the violin bow, is in direct rapport with the feelings of the
engraver. And it is so true that the slightest distraction in
the tracing of a line causes a slight involuntary pressure of
the fingers on the gouge and has an adverse effect on the line."
Henri Matisse, 1946.

linseed oil - A drying oil
used in paints, usually boiled
to make it faster drying.

Egypt, 1878-1843 BCE
(12th Dynasty), Lintel of Sesostris III, Medamoud Temple,
limestonebas-relief, 1.065 x 2.21 m, Louvre. Although
lintels are usually treated as merely functional,
and often hidden, they are occasionally emphasized,
as this one was. See rectangle.

In the spring of 2000, Afghanistan's Taliban
(Islamic
extremists in power) destroyed colossal statues of the Buddha, carved from
a living rock cliff at Bamiyan, 145 km west of Kabul, Afghanistan,
long before the arrival of Islam in that area. One of the statues
was 53 meters high and dated to the 5th century; the other was
37 metres tall and dated to the 3rd century. These were rare
examples of statuary in the Greco-Buddhist style, priceless ancient
relics of this important cultural crossroads. Several thousand
monks once lived in the caves next to the statue. The Taliban's
supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, ordered the destruction
in an edict, saying such images were contrary to
Islam. "These idols have been gods of the infidels, who
worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps
maybe turned into gods again," his edict said. Other resources
on this story: 1 and 2. (See Buddhist
art, Islamic
art, vandalism, and xenophobia.)